on awakening

Elizabeth Townsend

It is true that to swallow the dead, 
you must make of your throat 

a creek—let the old cry collapse 
again and again until an opening 

occurs and a drawbridge banks 
onto a kingdom of beasts. All the

old ones, the mythical inversions:
grazing dragons, horse-men, and a

little dog—serious, like a soldier, 
ready to accompany you down 

past the cattails and the canebrake.
The star points will lead you to the 

same narrow cut in the grass—
past teeth, past tongue—littered 

with one bulging ouroboros after 
another, the pink esophagus 

swallowing its sorrow, swallowing 
its sorrow, swallowing.

Elizabeth Townsend is a poet and psychotherapist living in Nashville, Tennessee. Her poetry has appeared in DIAGRAM and Beloit Poetry Journal, and will appear in forthcoming issues of Notre Dame Review, Thin Air Magazine, and other publications. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is currently at work on her first poetry collection.